A central dilemma of Moretti’s, how can there be any epic in the age of the nation-state, is a moot nonstarter on the colonial site. In the age of European empires of course we have anticolonial reconfigurations of epics. All you have to do is to count the number of progressive revolutionaries in Iran and other Persian-speaking countries who have named their children and grandchildren Kaveh after Kaveh the Blacksmith in the Shahnameh. This is not even to go near epic novels like Mahmoud Dolatabadi’s Kelidar, which would certainly qualify for the category of “modern epic” if we were to extend the category to “colonial modernity” to make it more globally accurate. What Moretti calls a world text, like Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848–1874) or T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), are actually European or Eurocentric texts, and their transfusion into the vacuous abstraction of “Western canon” is the clearest indication that such imperial hubris has no claim on the real world whatsoever. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1968) is not a reversal of Goethe’s Faust, as Moretti surmises, thus perpetrating irreparable epistemic violence on Márquez’s masterpiece. To do so he has to posit a “core” for “the world-system” he imagines and perforce a “periphery” to it. But magic realism is not a response to polyphony, nor is it there to tickle the “Western” fancy and offer it reenchantment. Consistently Moretti reduces Márquez’s novel to a figment of the “Western” imagination, robbing the literary landmark form Latin America of its own worldly demand for theorization without being a commentary on Faust. He categorically collapses and flattens out the condition of colonialism and treats Márquez’s magic realism as something of a panacea, a noble savage cliché, response to the cul-de-sac of “European modernity.”19
Why is it that a monumental novel like Mahmoud Dolatabadi’s Kelidar, a modern epic and a world text, entirely foregrounded on the tragic heroism of the Shahnameh, at one and the same time, does not even enter Moretti’s horizon? Is Iran not on this planet and part of this world? Doesn’t an epic written in Persian merit the term “epic”? Why, if not? Whatever the answer to such critical questions might be, the result of them is the serious compromising of the moment when Moretti and Eurocentric theorists like him come near the term “world.” What is the point of even informing these theorists what Mahmoud Dolatabadi’s Kelidar is all about, give a synopsis of it, describe its plots and characters, literary prowess and dramatic power? They have, by virtue of writing in Italian or English or French, claimed and coined the term “World Literature”—entirely oblivious of the presence of the Italian colonialism in Libya or British and French colonialism in the rest of Asia and Africa. They have an imperial claim over “their mother tongue,” which has come to us not through their kind and gentle mothers but the settler colonialism of their brutish and violent fathers. So they have their myopic world and we have the expanse of the entirety of the planet to our name to read and theorize.
Why is it that a massively popular film epic like Amir Naderi’s Tangsir is scarcely known outside Iranian film critics circles? Why, as David Quint references Sergey Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) toward the end of his book on European epics, can we not reference Amir Naderi’s masterpiece epic? Why is it that Moretti cannot see any “modern epic” beyond the limited imagination of a European literary theorist? What would happen if we did consider Naderi’s Tangsir as a “modern epic” and a world text? It will ipso facto dismantle both Quint’s and Moretti’s projects as having any serious implications for the real world beyond their fetishized conception of “Europe.” But that is not the point or even necessary. The point rather is the fact that current gestations of the Persian epic in films and fiction and opera radically reconceptualize how we imagine a “modern epic” or even a classical epic, for that matter. It will in fact confuse the Christian calendar ordination of classic, medieval, modernity altogether and posit an entirely different chronological order—no, not an Islamic calendar but a worldly calendar. Naderi in Tangsir turns defiant struggles of a simple working-class man who had worked as a servant to British colonialists to amass a small fortune to provide for his family into a national folk hero. The local merchants and authorities conspire to rob Zar Mammad of his life savings, and he unearths his long-buried gun to kill them all one by one publicly and in revenge for the terror they had perpetrated on him and takes his wife and son and runs away and disappears into the widening sea. It is nothing but the astonishing nativism of European theorists that they think their little hometown is the center of the universe and never as much as bother to get to know another world outside their captured imagination—and then monumental civilizations like China, India, Iran, or Egypt should bring their literary masterpieces to the door of these literary critics and plead for consideration to be admitted into “World Literature.”
DEWORLDING A WORLDLY TEXT
The Shahnameh became worldly in the context of worldly empires. With the collapse of those empires, it has lost that worldliness and yet has not gained its presence in the world in which we read it today. Against the dignity and mighty heritage of its origin, it has been relegated to the ghetto of “Third World Literature,” and thus its historic and innate worldliness has been taken away from it. Repositioning it in the context of its current world habitat requires a constant attention to its fragmentation, nationalist fetishization, its overpoliticization, and therefore the epistemic violence launched against its poetic power and epochal endurance.
Lost to all manners of paying merely iconic attention to the Shahnameh is the urgent necessity of placing it at the center of a new critical reading in the totality of its narrative logic (the way its episodes are related and connected to one another) accentuated by its poetic rhetoric, lending it overdue legitimacy via conversation with current literary critical issues, to restore life and liberty to its poetic character, honor and dignify it with a serious comparative literary attention. The text has been terribly domesticated into nativist (nationalist), Orientalist (Eurocentric), iconic (identity politics) back alleys of insular and closed-circuited regurgitations. A decade and a half into the twenty-first century the dominant modes of encounter with the Shahnameh (with very few notable exceptions) are still very much on the model of nativist nationalism, old-fashioned Orientalism, or fetishized talismanic identity politics.
As a worldly text, the Shahnameh has been systematically deworlded in the service of ethnic nationalism against nations, of politics against poetics, of empires against epics. So the key question concerns how the Shahnameh has fared in helping nations imagine themselves from bygone empires to postcolonial entities. The origin of linguistic and literary nationalism, as the political and ideological source of state-building projects, is deeply rooted in European colonialism. The very idea of Goethe’s Weltliteratur is predicated on a forced nationalization of literatures hitherto integral to varied imperial worlds. The same is true of the idea of “modern epic” that either exclusively considers masterpieces of European literature or casts an exotic look at Márquez’s masterpieces to appropriate them for a Eurocentric reading. The same holds true for the notion of “comparative literature in the age of multiculturalism,” ipso facto taking literary masterpieces out of their natural habitat. The West–non-West bifurcation has systematically nativized and deworlded texts such as the Shahnameh and compromised their imperial pedigree. The mythic, heroic, and historical time and narrative of the Shahnameh has suspended the timing of European chronology. Yes, the text of the Shahnameh was written a thousand years ago, but that does not make it medieval, or ancient, or modern, for it is written, composed, and read on an entirely different temporal scale.
The only way to retrieve and restore to worldly texts their worldliness is to replant them in their current history. That worldliness will not be restored unless and until we de-Europeanize their reception and reconstruct them to their own worldly conditions, from where we can then start embedding them in the world. We need to de-Europeanize their reception and reconnect them to their own worldly conditions. The Shahnameh lost
its own worldliness sometime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Europeans discovered it embedded in their bourgeois public sphere. That sphere became transnational and spread with the force of global capitalism (referring to its Europhilia chapter). One might argue that Shah Tahmasp’s Shahnameh was the last time it had its worldliness. What happened to it, torn into pieces and sold into slavery to various private collections and museums, is what happened to its worldliness. Iranians and other Persian-speaking worlds rediscovered their own Shahnameh dwelling in the veritable and European bourgeois public sphere. Thus the book was alienated from itself as it was from its original readers. Therefore, the fragmentation of empires into nations was itself another simulacrum of the worldliness of the Shahnameh being lost to itself.
Whether they critically edited, translated, or abbreviated it, they appropriated it into their own nationalized public sphere, from where it went back to Iran and other Persianate regions as postcolonial nation-states. These postcolonial nation-states are fragments of those empires, as fragmented pages of the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh were the enduring relics of the last time it was produced as a worldly text and exchanged between two empires. This coincided with the postcolonial nation-states, which now dominated it for state building and forced and manhandled it into the making of a nationalized literature. This forced the Shahnameh into a “Third World Literature” category that was deadly to its own worldliness. “All Third World Literature” was then declared allegories of the nation, which was all fine and dandy for the First World theorists. They got to theorize “their “World Literature” and cannibalize the literature of others. Third-Worlding a literature is to deworld it, rob it of its own worldliness. But what is its own worldliness? In my World of Persian Literary Humanism, I have outlined and theorized it, arguing that it is the world to which it belongs, and it is upon that world that it needs to be placed, definitive to a transnational public sphere and allow it to resume resorting agency in its readers. That leads us into colliding worlds, the world in which the Shahnameh is alienated from itself (“the West”) and the world in which it is alienated from its readers (“the Rest”).
The task at hand is to take the Shahnameh back from “the West” and give it back to “the Rest,” the rest of the world, which is the world—this is the only way it will become integral to a renewed understanding of world literature. The task is to make the Shahnameh meaningful and significant to “the Rest.” Unless and until the Shahnameh is made meaningful and significant to people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America it will never be restored to its worldliness in a new world. We must once and for all divest this ill-founded power in “the West” to decide where “the world” is. Almost the entirety of Shahnameh scholarship of the past two centuries has been geared to convince Europeans, and by extension North Americans, that the Persian epic belongs to their “World Literature,” that it is a masterpiece. But why? By what authority is that particular audience to be privileged? This world to which the Shahnameh now belongs is no longer an empire, but a world that is at the receiving end of an amorphous American empire. Here we must reverse the persistent folkloric attempt to pit Ferdowsi against Sultan Mahmoud. That folkloric history marks the consistent push to claim Ferdowsi for nations (peoples) that read him and wrest it away from empires that have historically abused it. In the same vein, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh has now returned to the people who read it. If Ferdowsi were alive today, he would have composed his epic in English—not because it is an imperial language but because it is the language of the colonized. Every single word of the original Persian so meticulously preserved has to be kept as the national treasure of multiple nations that hold that language precious to their collective heritage. But the Persian epic must be made to sing and seduce in all colonial languages we have inherited and made our own, by confiscating them from our former colonial masters. That is the meaning of the Shahnameh being part of a world literature that is currently beyond the horizons of their “World Literature.”
EPICS OF ANOTHER WORLD SYSTEM
The Shahnameh has historically created its own world, moving, as it has, from empires to nation-states, and it is precisely on that passage that it has announced itself as a piece of world literature, or as a “worldly text.” It is imperative to keep in mind here that the Shahnameh (as a text, a poetic event, a moral force) is neither Islamic nor Zoroastrian nor indeed exclusively of any other specific denomination—although Zoroastrianism and Islam inform its moral universe, and Shi’ism might in fact be considered a historically unfolded “story” in the prototype of the Shahnameh, or the sense of the tragic in Shi’ism might be considered coterminous with the Persian epic. Above all, the Shahnameh is a literary work of art, and it is as such that its moral imagination thrives on itself and works. The moral universe of the Shahnameh is the narrative outgrowth of its poetic idiomaticity. That idiomaticity has been rich and multisignificatory, ready to be interpreted in varied historical circumstances, from what European historiography calls medieval to modern.
To think of the Shahnameh in a comparative framework of epic narratives we need to dwell on its defining traumatic moments. The central traumas of the Shahnameh dwell in the three stories of Rostam and Sohrab, Rostam and Esfandiar, and Seyavash and Sudabeh. These three stories bring out the most potent, visceral, and emblematic power of the Persian epic. The entire narrative disposition of the Shahnameh, I believe, is informed by these three tragedies. To think about the Shahnameh as a “modern epic,” instead of going through Moretti’s Eurocentric “world system,” I suggest we bring three master epic filmmakers—Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, and David Lean—to meet Ferdowsi in their respective imperial idioms. Cinematic epic, I believe, is far more universal and is staged on far more democratic grounds than the deeply distorted field of “comparative literature” and therefore entails a far more enabling take on comparative epic. Comparatively, the central liberating trope of John Ford is the love and admiration of the young first-generation Irish-American of the New Promised Land—as perhaps best anchored between How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Long Gray Line (1955), among many others. The central trauma of David Lean is the pathology of the British Empire—as massively canvassed in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Ryan’s Daughter (1970), and A Passage to India (1984). The central trauma of Akira Kurosawa is the horror of Hiroshima he witnessed as a child and that subsequently defined the entirety of his cinema—as perhaps best demonstrated in the two masterpieces Throne of Blood (1957)—based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth—and Ran (1985), based on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Ferdowsi in his Rostam and Sohrab, Rostam and Esfandiar, and Seyavash and Sudabeh can transhistorically be placed in this epic quartet, where he echoes Kurosawa and corroborates Lean and Ford.
My contention is that the combined effects of the central traumas of the author and the text in each of these cases constitute the subconscious of the text and inform their kinesthetic. This means that the details of every sequence in the film or text—from every single shot to camera movement to mise-en-scène to editing, costume design, set design, and so forth—is also informed by that central trauma. This means that there is something celebratory and jovial about John Ford’s cinema, something nostalgic and pathological about David Lean’s, and something tragic about Kurosawa’s. Kurosawa is the closest epic filmmaker to Ferdowsi in the defining moment of both their kinesthetics. The centrality of Japanese medieval theater—in both Noh and Kabuki traditions—and the attraction to Shakespeare’s dramas are the clearest signs of Kurosawa’s inclinations toward archetypal epic—which might add additional dramatic reasons for the similarity of his cinematic aesthetics to Ferdowsi’s epic.
Both Iranian and former Soviet filmmakers have paid some attention to the Shahnameh in their film oeuvres. Abdolhossein Sepanta made Ferdowsi (1934) for Reza Shah’s celebration. The Pahlavi monarch did not like his portrait of Mahmoud and Ferdowsi and forced him to go back to India, where the film was made, and change those scenes and ordered his ambassador to India to a
ct as Mahmoud! Two other negligible films were made based on the Shahnameh. M. Ra’is Firuz’s Rostam and Sohrab (1957) and Siyamak Yasami’s Bizhan and Manizheh, both melodramatic flops. Fereydun Rahnema made two noteworthy films, Seyavash dar Takht-e Jamashid (Seyavash in Persepolis, 1967) and Pesar-e Iran az Madarash bi-Khabar ast (Iran’s son has no news from his mother, 1973). The most prolific filmmaker of the Shahnameh was Boris Kimyagarov (1920–1979), from Tajikistan, who made a few films based on Shahnameh stories, including Legend of Rostam (1971), Rostam and Sohrab (1972), and Legend of Seyavash (1977).20 There are also Indian and Azeri film adaptations of the story of Rostam and Sohrab, as well as an opera by Loris Tjeknavorian.
There is an active moral imagination at work in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh that holds the epic emotively expansive and narratively together. The same is of course true of John Ford, David Lean, and Akira Kurosawa’s respective modes of epic cinema. This, however, is not true of the American empire, which lacks any claim to any legitimacy or hegemony, and it is an empire almost despite itself. It does have a claim on Christianity, but it is more because it posits itself against Islam. John Ford’s cinematic oeuvre is the closest this empire has come to giving itself an epic narrative. But Ford’s cinema was the product of a first-generation young Irish imagination, which did its service and was in turn crushed under the myth of white settler colonialism. That myth does not allow for any other mythic form, folkloric or artistic, to give American imperialism even a semblance of hegemonic legitimacy.
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